It Will Go Wrong

In order for the audience to enjoy the event with incident takes skilled minds, ears and some good old fashioned brain for just a basic setup.

Imagine then, the personnel and logistical planning required for an artist touring the world.

Needless to say adhering to the laws of probability means if something can possibly go wrong. It at some point probably will.

Ideally this will happen in rehearsals when every issue can be addressed and eliminated but occasionally something will slip through and present it self to you during performance.

I thought you may like to know a few of the happenings I have encountered whilst on stage.

Feel free to be amused by them.

I am. :)

There are two gigs I remember that involve the sustain pedal on my keyboard.

Forms the pedal is as integral to te performance as the keys themselves.

At the first I missed the sound check because I was running late but it was just me on stage and therefore easy to the sound engineer to alter the levels as I started. Not ideal, nor recommended but there was no other choice.

What became apparent to me very soon after starting to play was that the polarity of the pedal was reversed. This meant that when the pedal was depressed instead of sustaining the note it was cut and when I raised my foot the pedal sustained. And I was singing!

To this day I have no idea what it sounded like. Rough guess? Not good.

The other pedal related story involved no sustain pedal at all.

I arrived at the gig expecting, as had been previously arranged, a weighted 88key stage piano with pedal.

This was not what I got.

The lesson here? Always pop your pedal in your handbag especially if you have a strong feeling that you should!

I have played a gig where the mic stand was not secured tightly and during the song I have had to dip lower and lower so that my voice would still be heard.

There was one outdoor gig in sub zero temparatures in Poland where there was not so much of a mishap, more of a miscommunication between me and the rest of the band who arrived on stage with hats, coats and gloves. Anybody who knows me will also know that I have no fun in the cold. By the end of our 45 minute set I could not feel my hands.

Another gig I performed with the same group involved undisclosed pyrotechnics. I had noticed the tubes during our soundcheck but as nobody mentioned it to us assumed that it was for another act during the evening.

Not so.

They were fired during one of our songs, relatively in time to the music.For some reason I sensed it coming and managed to continue singing save for trying to stifle my hysterics at the stunned reaction of a bandmate.

To date I have not fallen off the stage or during a performance so I suspect that that is on the horizon.

It seems to be a rite of passage. Neither have I exposed myself due to a wardrobe malfunction.

The next time you watch a performance that passes without event bear in mind all the probablilities that have been avoided.

All this outside the fact that the band remeber how to play and all the words to their songs!